SACRAMENTO, Calif.  _ The unemployment rate in California climbed again, hitting 12 percent in July as the state added just 4,500 payroll jobs for the month, officials said Friday.

The report by the state Employment Development Department showed much weaker job growth in July than June, continuing what has been a spotty economic recovery.

The jobless rate rose from 11.8 percent in June and hit 12 percent for the first time since March. Most industries added jobs, but big reductions in government payrolls shrank the net gain.

California still has the second-worst state unemployment rate in the nation, behind Nevada at 12.9 percent. The national rate in July dropped slightly to 9.1 percent.

A survey of California businesses in July counted 14.1 million payroll jobs, up by 189,400 jobs, or 1.4 percent, since July 2010.

That’s roughly enough to keep up with recent population growth in the state but not to recover from the loss of about a million jobs in the past five years during the housing bust and recession.

California continues to show wide economic variation from region to region.

The jobless rates in the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas stayed unchanged in July at 8.8 percent and 10.4 percent, respectively.

Los Angeles lost 30,600 jobs in the month and saw the jobless rate increase from 12 percent to 12.4 percent.

Inland areas hardest hit by the housing bust also stayed weak. The Stockton area lost 14,400 payroll jobs and saw unemployment rise from 16.6 percent to 17.5 percent. Imperial County, east of San Diego along the Mexico border, lost 1,600 jobs and saw the jobless rate climb from 29.7 percent to 30.8 percent.

The economic sputtering echoes the status of the U.S. economy. Jobless rates rose in more than half the states for the second month in a row.

Hopeful signs on hiring early in 2011 grew weaker after April, and stocks have plunged over the past several weeks amid growing fear that the economy will stay weak for a prolonged period.

“I do deserve it,” the 49-year-old says. “I’ve done everything I could to try and get a job. I tried to get back into the retail industry. I made the effort to, at my age, go back to college.”

President Barack Obama extended unemployment benefits for Smith and millions of other Americans when he signed tax-cut legislation Friday. It helps people who have been out of work more than 26 weeks but less than 99 weeks, though the benefits vary greatly from state to state.

They could be just about anybody. People with college degrees and people with no higher education. People who have resorted to living out of their cars. People who have cashed out their retirement savings. People who once held six-figure jobs and people like Smith, who was laid off from her job as a department manager at a jeweler’s a year  and a half ago.

What unites them is the bitterness in their voices as they talk about how badly they need unemployment benefits _ to clothe their children, to pay for heat, to save their homes from foreclosure.

“My options are to not pay my bills, have my house taken away, have creditors on me,” says Smith, a mother of two in Lyndhurst, Ohio, who has been supporting her family on an unemployment check that amounts to $477 a week before taxes.

In Ohio and the 24 other states with unemployment rates of at least 8.5 percent, the unemployed can receive benefits for up to 99 weeks. In other states, they get less than that _ in some cases as few as 60 weeks, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

The new law restores, for 13 more months, the 99-week maximum. It also renews federal programs that extend benefits beyond the 26 weeks that states always provide. Those federal programs had expired Nov. 30.

For unemployed people who spoke to The Associated Press across the country, the extension is a relief, but a shadow of the relief a new job would provide. They are frustrated not only with their struggles to find work, but with the accusations _ on TV, even by protesters outside the office for food stamps _ that they’re lazy, that they’re  not trying hard enough.

Right now, there is nothing Smith would like more than a job. Anything to get her out of her living room, where she spends her days trolling the Internet for jobs while the snow piles up outside.

Before her job with the jeweler, she spent two decades working for a fashion retailer that ended up leaving northeast Ohio. After her most recent layoff, she tried to change industries.

There are jobs in the medical industry, people told her. So she went back to school and became a certified medical assistant. Weeks blurred into months. And still Smith cannot find a job.

“We, the middle class, are just trying to keep our heads above water,” she says. “And you know what? We’re drowning.”

There are jobs in the medical industry, people told her. So she went back to school and became a certified medical assistant. Weeks blurred into months. And still Smith cannot find a job.

“We, the middle class, are just trying to keep our heads above water,” she says. “And you know what? We’re drowning.”

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“THEY HAVE NO IDEA”

“If I hear one more senator, congressman, TV pundit or whatever…”

Theresa Christenson can’t finish the sentence before breaking into tears.

“It really gets me when they say ‘you lazy people,”’ says Christenson, who lives on $1,720 a month in unemployment insurance benefits and what’s left of her dwindling 401K. “They have no idea how depressing that is when you have been beating your head against the wall, trying to find work. Every time I see that or read it, I just start  crying. They have no idea.”

Before she was laid off from a quality assurance job at Yahoo! in July 2009, Christenson, of Burbank, Calif., earned around $100,000 a year. The 58-year-old has managed to hang on to the 4-bedroom house that she co-owns with her sister, where they’ve lived for 22 years. Without the extension, she expected to lose the stucco, one-story “ho use that looks like every other house.”

She knows she’s better off than others, but depression has set in during the long, hard months of fruitless searching.

“People who have lost their homes and are now living out of their car _ my heart shatters for them,” she says. “I’m very, very thankful for the extension.”

Yet she says she’s disgusted by the deal between Obama and congressional Republicans that made the extension possible _ a deal that preserved tax cuts for the wealthy as well as the poor.

“I hate the cost,” she says. “That we got it at the cost of millionaires and billionaires getting to keep their money and stay at the same tax rate.”

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WINTER TO OUTLAST BENEFITS

The furnace broke down not long ago in Tina Price’s ranch home in Southfield, Mich., so she resorted to plugging in space heaters to keep her children warm. The 36-year-old mother of two young boys doesn’t expect much of a Christmas this year.

Her unemployment benefits were cut off in November and she’s been unemployed for about 92 weeks. She took a buyout from American Axle several years ago and hasn’t had steady employment since.

“I was just able to get them boots,” Price says of her children. “I’m just trying to keep my utilities on. There is absolutely nothing I can do at this point.”

The biweekly unemployment checks worth about $670 will last a few more weeks thanks to the new extension. But not enough to get her family through the winter.

“I’m still struggling to get things right,” she says. “My bills are sky-high because I have not been able to pay them _ the light bill, gas bill and water bill. I try to keep agreements with the utilities.”

Price still receives state assistance to buy food. Friends, family and “generous people” have also been helping, she says. She’s taking information technology classes as part of a career retraining program.

“I think everyone, right now, is stressed out,” she says.

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SAVVY, 60, STRIKING OUT

Mike Bryson left Pittsburgh when the steel industry collapsed, heading south for greener pastures in the form of Maryland’s electronics and computer industry. He found a job there but returned when it ended, and has been out of work since August 2009.

Bryson has experience and education _ he recently attended a technical training center and has many computer certifications _ but the 60-year-old believes his age has made it more difficult to find a job. He’s sent out hundreds of resumes.

“Right now, I’m computer savvy, Internet savvy, degreed, certified,” he says. “And I can’t find anything.”

Bryson was homeless and lived in his car for a while before finding the McKees Rocks Employment and Training Center, where he now works about 20 hours a week, making minimum wage and, ironically, helping other people improve their resumes and find work.

He still qualifies for about $200 a month in unemployment benefits, but says it’s still hard to make ends meet. He has no health insurance and fears what will happen when his car, which has more than 200,000 miles on it, breaks down for good.

“I want to work. I want a job. I’m tired of this,” Bryson says. “I have a car that’s breaking down on me everyday. I can’t live like this.”

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LAYOFF AFTER LAYOFF

Without the unemployment extension, Joan Niedhardt would have lost the roof over her head to foreclosure. She is living through her third bout of unemployment since 2004, when budget cuts cost her a $65,000-a-year job as an information technology project manager in state government.

“I am my only means of support,” says Niedhardt, of Bel Air, Md., who has been unemployed for the past six months. She desperately needs her current unemployment benefits, which would have run out next week.

She has worked as a grant writer, a public relations executive, a project manager, a web designer. After losing her job in state government, she went back to school for another degree in business management and computer science and a certification in web graphic design.

The other stretches of unemployment lasted nine months and two years, respectively.

Because she is overqualified for many jobs and nearing retirement age, Niedhardt suspects that employers worry she will leave for “something better that hasn’t come along in over six years.”

“I’d be perfect as a government contractor or employee, but most of the open positions require a current security clearance,” she says, “which you can’t get without an employee sponsor.”

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A TREE WITH NO PRESENTS

Zyola Nix is grateful that her 3-year-old daughter is too young to remember this Christmas in years to come. The 40-year-old single mother, who was laid off in March from a job in electrical mechanical design, put up a Christmas tree in their one-bedroom apartment. But there aren’t any presents beneath it.

“I don’t have an actual gift I can give her,” says Nix, of Denver. “For my daughter, it’s going to be like any other day.”

Nix worries about finding work in the aerospace and defense sectors, which have suffered from cuts to federal programs. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and astrophysics, “which is cool-sounding on paper but doesn’t do much in the workplace.”

She’s grateful for the benefits extension _ she gets about $1,600 a month, half of what she used to make. But she’d rather be working.

Reluctantly, but out of necessity, she’s gone to sign up for food stamps twice. Each time, Nix had to pass protesters who told her to get a job and stop mooching off the government.

“I don’t think some people ever could understand. I don’t think they have the capacity to understand,” she says. “They have an image of what an unemployed person is like, and there is no way to change that image until that person experiences true unemployment. And most of them never will.”

Employees could be notified of the job cuts as early as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with Yahoo’s plans. The person asked for anonymity because Yahoo hadn’t made a formal announcement.

The planned cutbacks represent about 5 percent of Yahoo’s work force of 14,100 employees. It will mark Yahoo’s fourth mass layoff in the past three years.

The latest two housecleanings have come under the company’s current CEO, Carol Bartz, a Silicon Valley veteran hired nearly two years, despite a lack of experience on the Web or in advertising _ Yahoo’s main source of revenue.

This week’s round of reductions is expected to be concentrated in Yahoo’s U.S. products group, which already has been undergoing an overhaul since Bartz hired former Microsoft Corp. executive Blake Irving to run the division last spring.

The job cuts won’t come as a shock. News of the looming layoffs was first reported last month by two popular technology blogs, TechCrunch and All Things Digital.

Yahoo’s feeble financial growth, stagnant stock price and recent management defections have raised questions about whether Bartz herself might be shown the door before her contract expires in January 2013.

The company’s revenue had edged up by less than 2 percent to $4.8 billion through the first nine months of the year, reflecting the difficulty Yahoo has had selling ads while other Internet companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook are thriving.

Google’s revenue climbed 23 percent to nearly $21 billion through the first nine months of the year. Privately held Facebook doesn’t disclose its results but it is growing so fast that it had to move into larger headquarters earlier this year.

Yahoo’s stock price fell 31 cents to close Monday at $16.70, a few cents below where it ended last year. Meanwhile, the technology-driven Nasdaq composite index has risen by 16 percent so far this year.

The malaise has spurred speculation that opportunistic buyout firms might put together a takeover bid for Yahoo, possibly in partnership with another embattled Internet icon, AOL Inc.

Bartz, 62, has repeatedly insisted Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, is heading in the right direction, although she has cautioned it might be another year or two before there’s a significant improvement in the company’s financial results.

In a memo circulated Friday, Chief Deputy City Attorney Bill Carter says the mayor can remove the heads of departments and people in appointed offices but he does not have the power under the city charter to fire most city employees on his own.

Villaraigosa ordered the immediate layoffs on Thursday to help to balance the city’s budget. The move came a day after the city council voted unanimously to postpone any action on job cuts for 30 days while they explore other options.

Mayor’s counsel Brian Currey says Villaraigosa will work through department heads to make sure the layoffs and transfers happen.